Review: Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, at Ancillary Review of Books

Sometimes I make very odd reading decisions. For example, in late March of this year, a time when I was regularly running for shelter ahead of Iranian missiles, I made the inexplicable choice to read Francis Spufford's latest novel Nonesuch, which takes place during the London Blitz. But although there were moments during my reading when I found myself wondering why I'd done this to myself, for the most part I found the experience of reading Nonesuch cathartic. There was something reassuring about the insight, sympathy, and yes, humor with which Spufford wrote about the experiences of his heroine, stock exchange clerk by day, good time girl by night Iris Hawkins, as she found her footing in a world where a bomb might kill you, but if it doesn't, there's still work to do in the morning.

Iris's already complicated life is complicated further when she learns that a secret occult society associated with the British Union of Fascists is trying to use magic hidden in London's public edifices to change the past so that Britain never enters the war. This places Nonesuch firmly in the tradition of "secret London" novels, in which the real city turns out to be underlaid by a hidden, magical one. Spufford's innovation on this form is that he never loses sight of the real history he is writing about, or pretends that it is less important. Even as Iris spends her evenings trying to save the world, she remains interested in how the city functions under fire, or how the economy (always a favorite topic of Spufford's) survives during wartime.

In my review of Nonesuch in the Ancillary Review of Books, I write about how he deftly, entertainingly manages this balancing act.

For the rest of the novel, Iris must juggle the already weighty burdens of an ordinary life during wartime with a cosmically ordained mission of global significance. The latter storyline puts her in a race with Lall, trying to identify the methods by which she plans to activate the working, and to carry out one of her own that will forestall Lall’s attempts. This produces some of the novel’s most stunning and thrilling sequences, in which Iris clambers over London rooftops in the middle of air-raids, half-in and half-out of reality, in danger from both German bombs and occult creatures. These chapters also show a profound love for and fascination with the storied history of London, the changing character of its neighborhoods, and the human history that is reflected in its edifices. That so many of those edifices are being destroyed even as Iris observes them only deepens the love the novel has for its setting.

Even as this adventure unfolds, however, Spufford does not lose sight of the mundane aspects of his story, or of the idiosyncrasies he has brought to them. Iris continues to be fascinated by finance, and thus offers us a window onto an aspect of the war that is rarely discussed. Spufford has made a name for himself as a writer who regards history from an economic standpoint, but nevertheless it’s startling when Ormond, at a house party where John Maynard Keynes is also a guest, observes to Iris that Churchill is the right man for the job because "he really doesn’t understand that there's a choice between fighting fascism and keeping the empire. Not a clue, economically; just not interested."

At the same party, Keynes marvels at having discovered, in Iris, "a believer in capitalism who is under the age of fifty". But although this is capitalism, it's not as we know it. It's strange enough to read, in 2026, Iris's complaints about getting a mere four percent interest rate on her checking account; but there's something genuinely otherworldly, almost more so than angels and time machines, about a government simply forbidding the purchase of foreign stocks during wartime, or requisitioning the ones in its citizens' portfolios. It's enough to make you sympathize—as Spufford obviously does—with Iris's desire to be a part of the great engine of moneymaking. When she finally lights on an investment strategy that makes sense in the context of a war and the collapsing British economy—realizing that any blue chip stock is worth investing in, because "their actual value was either zero or (in the long term, with the war won) their usual peacetime price"—Spufford puts it in terms that make it seem like an expression of patriotism and hope: "It would be a wild gamble to invest now, but only the wild gamble on survival that the country was taking anyway".

Nonesuch is a delightful novel that ranges far and wide and nevertheless reads almost effortlessly. If there's one point to be made against it, it is that its final pages reveal it to be the first volume (of two, I believe), which ends with an absolutely vicious cliffhanger. If you're like me, though, you'll enjoy reading it so much that you'll be absolutely desperate for the story's conclusion.

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